My biggest issue is that this is NOT new. The limited-memory adversary AND a scheme that is very similar to the one Rabin proposes (**as described by NYT**) appear in Ueli Maurer's "Conditionally-Perfect Secrecy and a Provably-Secure Randomized Cipher" (J. of Cryptology, vol 5, no 1, pp 53-66, 1992). Rabin's addition to Maurer's scheme seems to be the use of public-key encryption to set up a private key, i.e., the index into the random oracle stream. But that's not new, either.
The "limited memory but computationally unbounded" adversary model is not new. And neither is Rabin's scheme (as it is described in the NYT). In fact, Ueli Maurer proposed an almost identical scheme AND the limited memory adversary in "Conditionally-Perfect Secrecy and a Provably-Secure Randomized Cipher" in 1992.
I'll be -very- surprised if this work ever sees print in the cryptographic literature, because the reviewers will (probably rightfully) classify it as unoriginal and unimportant.
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My biggest issue is that this is NOT new. The limited-memory adversary AND a scheme that is very similar to the one Rabin proposes (**as described by NYT**) appear in Ueli Maurer's "Conditionally-Perfect Secrecy and a Provably-Secure Randomized Cipher" (J. of Cryptology, vol 5, no 1, pp 53-66, 1992). Rabin's addition to Maurer's scheme seems to be the use of public-key encryption to set up a private key, i.e., the index into the random oracle stream. But that's not new, either.
The "limited memory but computationally unbounded" adversary model is not new. And neither is Rabin's scheme (as it is described in the NYT). In fact, Ueli Maurer proposed an almost identical scheme AND the limited memory adversary in "Conditionally-Perfect Secrecy and a Provably-Secure Randomized Cipher" in 1992. I'll be -very- surprised if this work ever sees print in the cryptographic literature, because the reviewers will (probably rightfully) classify it as unoriginal and unimportant.